Services transition refers to taking over a service operation such as application management, customer service management, transaction management, and launching a new process for managing the operation. Delivery process refers to an ongoing, regular process of managing and maintaining a service operation such as the above after the service transition has been completed. Such services transition and delivery processes have specific characteristics, e.g., they are human driven, document centric, highly flexible processes. They also have dynamic tasks with flexible input and output formats.
Standardized workflow management and monitoring tools are not appropriate to manage services transition and delivery processes because, for instance, typical information technology (IT) artifacts are email, spreadsheets, project plans, sometimes having content and knowledge management.
Requirements on time and budget do not allow for full data and process integration. Data and resources are logically and physically distributed and are heterogeneous, making full data and process integration difficult. Business insight through monitoring and metrics is required to increase profitability.
Existing systems and approaches to monitor well established processes and data may include business intelligence systems and metric dashboard. However, they require full data integration and metrics modeling prior to becoming operational. Data mining and process mining technologies may be used to discover structures and frequencies in documents and execution traces. However, such technology is applied on specific business domain with specific mining targets. Business provenance and correlation discovery may provide for generic mechanism to express and extend representation of business operations. Again, however, the technology is applied with specific provenance types and procedures.